Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars Read Online Free PDF Page A

an hour. We don’t have much time left. We have to find some way out of here. The fish truck is marked.”
    â€œI have an idea,” said Carrie. She called the waiter over in a perfect Parisian accent.
    â€œOui, madame?”
    â€œPourriez-vous m’indiquer une maison funéraire?”
    â€œMadame?”
    â€œMon oncle est très malade,”
responded Carrie, shaking her head sadly and putting a tearful expression on her face.
    â€œMes condoléances, madame. Un moment,”
said the waiter. He disappeared into the restaurant and came back a moment later with a name andaddress written on a scrap of paper:
Mercier et Fils, 46 Rue de la Barrière
. The waiter then proceeded to give Carrie detailed directions.
    Rue de la Barrière turned out to be a narrow side street on the western edge of town, its narrow sidewalks laid out with cut flagstone and its buildings two stories high, stone as well. Mercier et Fils had two curved barn doors with a long building beside it, and chapel-like windows set into the old walls. The barn doors had an old hasp and an immense lock.
    â€œI called the number the owner of the restaurant gave me,” said Carrie. “It sounds like he’s having his calls forwarded to his home. The person who answered sounded like a little girl.”
    â€œEddie,” said Holliday, nodding at the lock.
    The Cuban slipped a pry bar from the fish van into the hasp of the lock and pulled. It tore off at the hinges and they eased through the doors.
    Holliday pulled the string of a naked bulb that was hanging from the roof of the garage. Stuffed inside the dark, cavelike garage was a 1955 Citroën hearse—which really looked like it was no more than an ambulance painted black and the words “Mercier et Fils” in gold Gothic-style script on the side panels. Holliday eased his way toward the left side of the boxy, high-roofedvehicle, opened the door and slipped behind the wheel. The keys were still in the ignition.
    â€œOpen the garage doors,” he whispered. Once it was done, he switched on the ignition, scratched the unfamiliar shift into reverse and backed out onto the narrow street. Eddie and Carrie closed the doors and then squeezed into the forward passenger compartment.
    â€œNow what?” Carrie said as they puttered out of town at an appropriately somber rate.
    â€œNow we go and visit my old friend Professor SpencerBoatman.”

4
    Professor Spencer Maxwell Boatman sat at the tiny table set outside the Cour de la Huchette drinking café au lait, occasionally dunking his pain au chocolat into the milky coffee. In most cities, the Rue de la Huchette would have been called an alley, but this was Paris and nothing here was done as other cities. Directly across from where he sat was an even narrower thoroughfare leading down to the Seine called Rue du Chat-Qui-Pêche—Street of the Fishing Cat—which was named hundreds of years ago for the cats who went there to fish for carp when the river regularly flooded in the spring.
    Boatman was in his mid-forties but he still had the air of a tall, slim figure from a Renaissance painting by Raphael. His face was long, the features as smooth and sculptured as a statue by Cellini, his hair black but tinged with streaks of silver, his largeeyes suffering from heterochromia—one eye a bright blue, the other startling green.
    Today he was wearing a pale linen suit, a small blue-checkered handmade Egyptian cotton shirt and Russian calf loafers. He was the kind of middle-aged man who young girls fell in love with as easily as taking in a deep breath. The kind of man people his own age knew to keep away from their daughters. On top of that, he had an IQ of 224, an eidetic memory, doctorates in everything from chemistry and physics to archaeology and psychology as well as a background that included more wealth than several medium-sized countries. To make matters worse, Spencer Boatman had never